


The Fishhook Covenant

by aetataureate



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Other, excessive americana, haunted road trip, swamp god televangelist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:33:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27926056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aetataureate/pseuds/aetataureate
Summary: Towns notice him from the outside in.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 14
Kudos: 48





	The Fishhook Covenant

Towns notice him from the outside in. The homeless guy outside the liquor store first, always, or the 7-11 in a dry county. Then whoever’s not from around here, tossing him a peach from the roadside stand, or leaning up against his truck in the parking lot of the hardware store just to chat. If he passes by the same spot two, three times, old women at nowhere bus stops they must have walked miles to get to wave cheerfully. When the waitress at the diner starts refilling his mug for free with a smile, that means it’s about time to leave.

Sometimes, though, Will enters a pocket of space and time where nothing notices him at all. It happens less now that he’s older and less likely to go skittering sideways out of his skin with whatever combination of brain chemicals it is that makes you young. Still, he stumbles into these small interruptions sometimes, like he’s taken shelter in a town too small to be found on any map.

That’s where he is this morning, although when he left the motel the cleaning woman was leaning against the exterior wall to his room like she was hoping to fall through it. His less metaphysical location is Dilles Bottom, Ohio—big enough for Google to have spotted, but only just. There’s an okay diner just outside the notional limits: bad coffee, upholstery on the booths doing alright for its age. The waitress has a name Will is incapable of remembering. She’s not pretty, personable, or particularly industrious; Will doesn’t want to cause her any grief regardless. His two dots and a dash got to him eventually.

There’s a small TV set up at a funny angle over the counter, so that the customer and the short-order cook perched on his stool in the back can both sort of see it. Someone’s up on a stage in a suit and an ugly patterned tie, muted but earnest as a door-to-door salesman, and as Will squints past the spotlights and reflected fluorescent glare, the guy seems to wink at him. Will blinks away sleep and leans in for a better view, wondering whether he’s already been pinpointed, but it’s just Joel Osteen on the other side of the light.

“Want me to turn that up, handsome?” the waitress asks, looking a half-second away from offering him the blueberry muffin that Will knows for a fact has been in the display case since at least last Monday with the intention of doing him a genuine favor.

“No, thank you,” Will says, focusing back on his plate. There’s far too much egg left to scarf down whole, unfortunately. “Actually, could you box this up?”

***

Will first saw the man in the TV the summer he turned fourteen. That was after the end of eighth grade, the first summer his dad took him out of school with no intention of ever putting him back. The two of them sputtered around the country in too-big and too-small collared shirts, _Will_ embroidered on the pocket of one and _Bill_ on the other, stripped-down single-thread-color evocations of the Greenbrier Steam Shovel Company logo over their hearts. Will crumpled up the summer reading list Mrs. Richardson hand-wrote him and tossed it out the window onto the shoulder of I-20: no longer a student, but an apprentice.

They were a funny mismatched duo, like a pair of jacks out of different decks. Will stayed little with oversized hands until he was near nineteen, and the guys on job sites would try to joke with him, avuncular, until they realized it wasn’t that he was shy, he just wasn’t fun. His dad was shaped vaguely like an armchair, with a full head of hair and many of his teeth. He mostly said things like “no, like this”—a wrist grab and redirection—“like _this_ ,” and “Who’d you let touch this? Carlyle? _Carlyle?_ ”

On and between jobs they’d stay at shitty motels with sagging double beds and loud radiators; Will thought they seemed very adult. His dad would take first shower, and it was Will’s job to figure out what was good on the TV—reception, not quality, was key. 

When Will first caught the man—or when the man finally caught back up with Will—they were on a route through Bismarck heading to a mine less than five years from defunct, and the airwaves were even more sparsely occupied than usual. Will was lying on the bed by the radiator, staring mostly down at his socks, which fit him like loose skin, wondering mostly whether or not he’d grow into them before they wore through. His attention was not on the TV—he’d cycled through the two and a half distinguishable channels twice before coming back around to the televangelist, whose picture was at least clear. His dad liked televangelists less than sports or the news or anything playing a movie, but more than music videos or talking to Will, so Will left it on even though the man’s accent was strange enough that he assumed something was wrong with the sound.

“When we listen with only the skimming surface of the mind, we lose even that which we considered irrevocably enmeshed in the nets woven by the labor of our own hands,” the man said, or something like it. Will wiggled his toes. The socks were capacious enough that they hardly moved. “Hands vulnerable, as Jeremiah warned, to the triplet dangers of famine, war, and deadly disease. Hands that, absent stronger, better-guided brethren, will lie curled in death upon the ground to be gnawed upon by bird and beast. Unmourned.”

It was a strange sort of sermon, even for the TV-and-radio crowd. There wasn’t much in the way of spotlights and rapture. The set was small and dimly lit, and it looked warm through the screen. In the shower, Will’s dad could be heard knocking the full complement of tiny bottles into the tub, then swearing. “The world has oft called Jeremiah lonely, forbidden as he was to take a wife, and frightening as his message was to Judah.” 

Will considered, in turn, the benefits of ordering Chinese to the room and the consequences of wasting cash on the delivery boy. “Yet how could he be, filled up to the brim of himself with the light and noise of his God?” Will could use some cash of his own. He wondered if there was some kind of job he could get as an interstate delivery boy. “The remedy for loneliness, one must assume, is simply _listening_.” Drug running, he guessed that might be called. 

A quick cut to an extreme close-up on the televangelist’s disapproving face. “Tell me, Will. Would it frustrate you to go unheard?”

Will propped himself up on his elbows and stared at the TV. The man gave a smile that was mostly mocking condescension. “Better,” he said. “I was beginning to doubt your interest in Jeremiah. And after I chose him especially for you!”

“Whoa,” Will said, and the man’s smile went slightly crooked.

“It’s alright,” he said. There was something sharp and hollow in his face, and it hooked itself into the base of Will’s gut. Years later, he’d play the strange connect-the-dots tying it to the alien-appealing way that David Bowie looked in _Labyrinth_ , and to the skeletons of dead oak trees at night. “I do aim to impress. Acts of God are not, after all, admired for their subtlety.”

“Dad?” Will called, and the water in the shower shut off.

“Oh, so soon?” the man asked. “Until next time, then,” and the camera pulled back with dizzying speed onto what was suddenly a packed auditorium. Women had tears streaming down their faces, and the man onstage, who was suddenly bloody, robust, and entirely new, took a sweeping bow. Will’s dad came through the door with a towel around his waist.

“This shit?” he asked, and Will blinked at him.

“Or the infomercials,” he said. “They’re pretty fuzzy.”

His dad huffed. “See if there’s Chinese we can call in to,” he said, turning away. 

There was, and Will spent the rest of the night stewing over the word _subtlety_.

***

Will walks out of the diner and into the open-aired neutrality of rural Ohio: too warm in a sturdy canvas jacket and heavy boots, but not so warm as to be interesting or worthwhile to complain about. He swings himself up into the cab of his truck and lets the radio seek without settling while he finishes his breakfast out of the styrofoam box on his lap, then switches back to the least grating of the morning shows on his way over to the job site.

Will works in mining. Specifically, he works on control systems for walking dragline excavators, inspecting and maintaining the analog electronic cards on the dozen-and-counting-down machines around the country owned by groups that have yet to see the logic in digital logic. Technically, Will is the last remaining Greenbrier employee, and according to a lawsuit that was settled in a manner so arcane as to be fairly termed Faustian, the “lifetime” of the warranty on their equipment is Will’s. Instead of shelling out millions for refurbishment or replacement, a scattered handful of mostly-coal operations can split his thirty-five a year between themselves until they decide not to anymore.

He manages to navigate the usual clocking in, hard-hat-and-glove donning, and dragline locating without talking to anyone but Sandra in the main office, who is unavoidable. He registers his presence briefly with the foreman and slips into the belly of the beast: tragically, occupied.

“Howsit,” says John, who has way less business in the power control room than Will suspects his boss realizes. People like the air conditioning. 

“Fine,” Will says. “Final checks today.”

“Where next?”

“North Dakota.” He checks a couple of the gauges, making notes in his log, then realizes that’s wrong. “Sorry, Wyoming.”

“No problem, Arkansas,” John says. He thinks he’s funny. “Nice driving out that way.”

“Mm,” Will says. He moves to fiddle with a dial that John is in the way of, mostly unnecessarily. John apologizes and gets out of his hair.

Will met a lawyer in a bar once, civil rights instead of personal injury, who goggled at a description of his contract and told him he might have a case under one the amendments in the actual Constitution. He bought Will a drink and gave him his card, but Will never called. Technically, he has the same easy out as his employers do: bring in a replacement. Problem is, then someone else would have to drive around the endless middle with him to learn the job, which honestly isn’t so bad anyway.

The system’s looking fine, for now, and with any luck will hold until Ohio comes back around on the routine maintenance roll. He’s getting sick of angry phone calls bouncing off satellites and hitting him from a thousand miles away,

On his way offsite, Will buys a cold soda and a couple of sandwiches from the company store. He pops the top on the can while sitting in the driver’s seat, keeping the condensation well away from his atlas as he double-checks the major arteries running out of this part of Ohio. It’s about as necessary as double-checking the veins that run from his elbow to his wrist. The atlas goes into the glovebox and the parchment wrapping of the sandwich gets spread out across his lap. If he pushes it, he can probably get a third or so of the way to Wyoming before dark.

***

For a long time, it was _just_ the TV. He never bothered Will much when he was trapped in the box—he could be comforting, even, like Dan Rather could be comforting if you didn’t listen too closely to what he was saying. It was simply the background hum of the quietest little pockets of Will’s life. 

The man talked a lot about putting your hands in other people’s guts, some sort of metaphor that Will didn’t understand yet. He’d talk about the slick blood feeling and the power inherent in rearrangement—he was the only person Will ever heard say the word ‘viscera’ on TV. Will would sort through the contents of his faded green laundry bag and let the images evoked pulse through his mind in time with his heartbeat. The man on the screen would smile at him. Idly, Will thought of it as his show, not the other way around—the strangest little program never to grace the pages of _TV Guide_.

When the man finally unhitched, Will was driving through Kansas, or one of the states around Kansas, sixteen, his dad conked out in the passenger’s seat of the old Ford cargo van they had back then. It was the middle of the day, and he was playing the license plate game while listening to the half-murmur of two different radio stations over top of each other—and it must have been Nebraska, because they were almost out of range of the Omaha stations but not yet in reach of Denver. The jazz layer of the country-jazz fuzz crackled out, and the man’s voice popped through in a burr of static—“Can you hear me, Will?”

“Dad, you hear that?” Will asked, glancing sideways, but his father was snoring fully open-mouthed, sun visor casting a shadow across the top half of his face.

“Let him sleep, Will,” the voice said, tuning in and out like someone was adjusting the dial, Garth Brooks still bemoaning his lot in the background. “Just sit with me awhile.”

Will and the voice made it from North Platte across the border in pleasant company, the voice pointing out old homesteads, lost villages, and turnoffs where the bodies had never been found. On and off, those drives would resemble the best education in American history Will would ever be inclined to get. 

Later, when things between Will and the voice turned baldly ugly most of the time, Will would choose to spend six weeks driving in the billowing silence of a busted window and gouged-out stereo that were the result of parking where he knew he shouldn’t. Perched between the two empty maws, Will would manage to retain all the righteous self-satisfaction of a lover after a well-fought quarrel until he walked into a Wal-Mart to buy underwear one day and the voice came on over the PA system, calling a lost child home.

***

There’s a cardboard sign that Will tapes up on the back of his truck sometimes, over the window decal that reads GREENBRIER S. S. Co. ✲ SERVICE FOR A LIFETIME. That one says MECHANICAL REPAIR over his cell phone number in twice-layered Sharpie. Usually, he only gets calls once he’s left town, or from places he never really stopped. Every now and then, someone catches him on the tail end of a stay, and he’ll swing by to whack something with a wrench and drink their coffee. It’s the only time he still sees the insides of houses.

His phone rings before he hits the Belmont County line. The woman on the phone says she needs a TV fixed, which isn’t the kind of mechanical repair Will meant by the sign, but she says it’s one of the old CRT ones so he can probably do it anyway. He makes a U-turn through the grassy cut in the highway median that cops use to cheat and heads back towards what counts as town.

The phone lady turns out to be a mom with three kids in a falling-down two bedroom and no husband in sight. Her TV’s probably a genuine necessity. It’s also an easy enough fix—a single faulty yoke coil, and Will’s so pleased it’s that simple that he’s not even inclined to charge her the twenty for the part.

Will crouches in front of the TV, which sits safely on the floor in front of its rickety stand. He flips it on to check the picture rotation and there’s a pop, then the afterburn outline of a face like a skull. Will reaches out to feel the static coming off of him, but the image fades almost immediately into a children’s cartoon. The oldest kid, a mean-looking eight-year-old already in band t-shirts, pumps his fist and gives a triumphant roar at the sight of Clifford the Big Red Dog. His mom rolls her eyes and smiles at Will, crooked. 

***

Until Will was about twenty, his dad kept a little place back in Louisiana: peeling paint, yellow walls, access to a swamped little stretch of creek by a dock that was half gap. Will’s dad would settle into the old lounger in the front room every night with a twelve pack, listening to the hum of whatever couldn’t come in through the screens: june bugs, Wheel of Fortune. One morning he did not get up. He had been rearranged.

The phone rang just as Will was starting to get really upset, and he had never been so glad to hear the voice— _the_ voice—on the other end.

“You’d better be on your way,” it said, calm, but not unfeeling. “I’ll take care of it.” Will was forty-five minutes away in the truck, nothing but country, soft rock, and Car Talk on any of the presets, by the time he thought to ask himself just what the hell he was doing. He made the most illegal U-turn of his entire life and was back home in twenty-eight, breathing like he ran the distance, but by then there was nothing in the lounger beyond whatever dust had settled into the weave. It still reminded him of his dad’s shape. There was no one in any of the pictures on the windowsill but Will.

His father wasn’t in the phonebook, either, not by the time Will found a booth that still had one dangling by its cord. The payphone rang, and Will picked it up and cradled it between his ear and shoulder, flipping through the G’s one final time.

“Let it go, Will,” the voice said. “I told you I’d take care of it.”

***

The woman walks him the short way to the door, and as he steps over the threshold she says, “Hey,” with a hand on his elbow. He turns, and she stretches up to kiss him, gently but firmly on the mouth. Will’s eyes cut to the kids, who are glued to the TV and don’t notice.

She obviously doesn’t want him. He doesn’t really want her either—neither one of them has put themselves together in the shape of a person who wants and is wanted by other people. It’s nice, though, being close, and for a split second his eyes close, and his hand comes around to her lower back. His thumb runs across the dip of her spine, in between the pads of fat and muscle.

There’s a groan, and the dead tree Will had noticed in her front yard on his way in comes crashing through her window. They wrench apart in shock, and the woman yells her kids’ names. The tree missed them but took out the TV.

Will regrets the whole thing immediately—the front room’s host to an ugly, gaping maw, and there’s no way her insurance is any good. He mumbles something like an apology, minus the specifics and the reassurances, as he trips his way backwards out her door. The woman’s freaking out and holding her kids, but she’s also looking at him like he’s exactly what she should have expected him to be. Which, to be fair, he mostly is.

Will gets back in his truck, and the old neighbor lady who’s already made her way out onto the street to gawk and speculate clucks her tongue at him. Will locks the door between himself and her. He’s on the map again, which is like being an animal in a state park. People are tempted close, and there are consequences. It is unfair by design.

The old lady looks like she might be the type to walk up and rap on his window, which Will, for no good reason, finds more unsettling than the tree. Still, he has come to understand the value of a calm, controlled departure. He doesn’t pull out from the driveway until he’s double-checked, again, the atlas, tracing the cleanest route through with his finger.

***

Before he got the truck, when it was still him and his dad’s old cargo van, Will was once on a winding two-lane mountain road when Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata cut off and the voice said, with force and clarity, “Stop the car, Will.” He did, slotting it into the first neat space between rocks on the shoulder. He turned off the ignition and waited, hands folded in his lap like a schoolboy, clutching the keys.

A minute passed, then two. Will jangled the keys nervously. “I should—” he began.

“Wait, please,” the voice said.

In less than a minute, a sedan appeared from around the bend ahead just as a truck came visible in the rearview mirror, fishtailing with the effort of a straight line. They met just ahead of Will’s car, the truck running a slalom line into the left lane. The sedan came off the road to avoid a direct hit, but the shoulder was packed wrong and gave out like after a rain, the truck going over after the sedan in what could be construed as surprised acquiescence. 

They both fell incredibly far. The sound was deafening.

“Why did you tell me to stop?” Will choked out, and that time, the voice came straight from the ringing silence over his right shoulder.

“Because I wanted you to see.”

It was twenty-five minutes downhill before Will had the service to make a call. They ended up asking him to come in to the station to talk about it. The station was a one-room podunk affair, the deputy’s desk line-of-sight from the drunk tank. There was a man in there, the kind of man who was probably in there a lot, and when Will walked in he said, “Oh, wow!” and “That’s beautiful, man, you’re beautiful. He’s beautiful,” and when the cop, who was already upset about the accident, looked at him halfway suspicious and all what-the-fuck, Will just shrugged instead of saying, _I used to think so, too_ , and, _Someday I might again._

After he’d signed just about every form the deputy could remember existed, Will sat in the parking lot for a long time, hands on the wheel but keys in the cupholder. He could almost see the man from the TV out of the corner of his eye, a shadow in the passenger’s seat, but he blinked out of existence whenever Will tried to look. Gradually, Will realized his grip on the wheel was painful and his hands were shaking. He had a very precise plan for the man in the drunk tank.

“That’s yours,” Will said into the air. “You did that. Not me.” 

Nothing answered.

“You did all of it.” 

The silence was pointed, prompting.

“I’m not going back in there.” Will insisted. “I’m leaving. I’m leaving him alone.” He started the van, and the radio flipped on with a sigh. 

“If you wish to,” the voice said, tinged with polite regret. “But he’d give himself over of his own will. He sees you how I see you, Will.”

Will laughed, lightly hysterical. There was something _in_ the van with him, and it would never leave. “Yeah? How’s that?”

The voice curled, somehow, the aural equivalent of the Cheshire Cat’s grin. “As an opportunity to become more than he is.”

***

Will does not remember this, but when he was four he caught a fishhook in his hand. He was playing out by the creek, risking the weed snares in the water and one particular lazy alligator, though he didn’t know that at the time. The hook was in the mud he was shaping into a sloppy, hovelish castle with a stone for a flag and real water for the moat, and it went straight through the webbing of his right hand. It was a small hook—he was a small boy. Will was too surprised to cry, and too strange himself already to think it strange when a man dressed like he was rich and famous knelt down beside him on the bank.

“Oh, Will,” the man said, “let me see,” and Will stuck his palm out like they were going to shake hands. The man closed both of his own around Will’s hand and forearm, and when he let go again the hook was gone, leaving a smear of blood on his dry hands and a small knot of scar tissue on Will’s. “Thank you for returning that to me,” he said seriously.

“You’re welcome,” said Will, who’d been told that he might never have much but manners. The man smiled like a cartoon, and he brushed his knuckles across Will’s sweaty forehead. 

After that, Will had an imaginary friend.

“Are you the oldest person in the world?” Will asked him once. It was the week his mom became gone, and Will was walking carefully along the rotting log in the brush, the man at his side.

“Hm,” the man said, considering Will’s question. He had his hands folded behind his back, and he was taking very slow steps. “There are a number of semantic considerations implicit in your question. Certainly there are many things in this world much older than I am.”

“Even in Louisiana?” Will asked.

“Especially in Louisiana,” the man told him. “But Will, you and I will go further from Louisiana than you can imagine.”

“Like to America?” Will asked.

“In the beginning, yes, I think we will,” the man said, and he held out his hand so that Will could do a big jump off the log and not fall.

***

Will’s phone rings the moment he crosses the county line, and he flips it open and brings it to his ear, trying his best to summon “annoyed, but not affected” as he barks his own name.

“I miss you when you’re away,” the voice says. He doesn’t sound annoyed either, not hot, not cold, just warm and even.

“Where’s away?” Will asks, sarcastic. It’s nowhere consistent that he’s been able to identify on the map.

“Once you feel it for the first time, you’ll always know,” the voice says, and Will huffs at him but doesn’t hang up. 

They drive in the crackling silence of an open line for a while, Will with the phone tucked into the cradle of his shoulder and two fingers hooked like fangs over the bottom of the steering wheel. The road’s wide and unchanging, the dangerous trick of an easy drive. 

Every so often, Will glances sideways at the worn upholstery and scratched-up dashboard. He sometimes wonders what it will be like, the day he turns to find the man in the passenger’s seat. It’s a guaranteed coin flip of a moment, and he pictures it differently each time. Himself, slamming on the brakes. Himself, veering off the road. Himself with a retort of unprecedented sharpness and bite, which forces the man back under the water for a thousand years. 

Today, they’re driving in silence. The man rolls down the window and feels the wind play across his hand. After a while, he turns to Will and smiles.

“Would you like to choose where we begin?” he asks.

**Author's Note:**

> the swamp god televangelist concept is the collective hallucination of myself, galwednesday, jinlinli, gracelesso, and silentwalrus. the serial numbers have been gently filed back on. thank you to them for lending me their considerable brainpower in order to produce something inexplicable.


End file.
